The Fated Bonds
by Vesper Moonshine
Summary: This box is too small for a summery, click and read a better one.There's Quistis, Seifer, war, war profeteers, revolutionaries, fallen gods, and Edea has a secret that could change the world forever.Should be lots of fun, give a girl a chance. Click Click
1. The Weary Woman in the Water

**This is an idea I've been knocking around for a while. This is my first Seiftis, but it's also very plot driven. This is also the first story I've tediously planned out, and I'm really starting to like it, I hope you all do too.**

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**Summery: Five years after the end of the Second Sorceress War, Timber is still fighting for its independence from Galbadian occupation. Break through methods from Timber's University in junctioning magic to water reservoirs to promote immunity to magic damage has enabled Timber to afford Balamb Garden's help. Quistis, dejected and rethinking her life and career choices, has taken a position as Balamb Garden's war Ambassador to Timber, and has been living away from her childhood friends for three years. ****Seifer has taken up with Timber's infamous Aurus crime family, and is making a living as a war profiteer. Fate will bring these two lost people together once again, and this time they'll see what they had always missed.**

**In the sudden light of a peace treaty between the two countries, Edea has finally remembered the witch's motivations for flattening out time and the secret could change life as The Fated Children know it.**

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**Disclaimer: I don't own them, but I certainly wouldn't mind borrowing Seifer for a little alone time. **

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**_The Fated Bonds_**

**_By _**

**_Vesper Moonshine_**

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**_Prologue_**

**_The Weary Woman in the Water_ **

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Edea still continued to listen for them even now, at times she almost swore she could hear their bubbling laughter marry the gurgling retreat of every wave. Sometimes she would see ethereal forms ghost through the old stone cottage like fog or a frosty wisp of breath winnowing out into a cold night. In moments of lonely be-daze she was certain the ghosts wrapped themselves in flesh and sinew, their little legs smacking and pounding on the floor instead of noiselessly drifting over. For just an addled moment her children would come home.

Then she would blink them all away.

She knew they were gone from the house of wisteria, sea salt, and sand, scattered ounce again like little petals in a gale. They had found one another in the forced camaraderie of war only to lose one another in long battles, thier strenuous continuation, in life's endless call of obligations. They'd saved the world from an evil sorceress bent on flattening time out like butter spread over toast, a single one dimensional medium, but they all soon came to realize in their own way that the one thing they could not save the world from was itself. They became weary, and they were all too young to be so.

Five years had pasted since she'd had them all in one place, and even longer still since she'd seen them all smiling together, at one another. But she'd watched from the corners shrouded in shadow, from the side lines she now resigned herself to, and she knew that their pain was shared, but not expressed. They were all foreigners in each others individual country with only the vauge comfort of a colective memory to guide them.

She feared this was her fault.

Edea Kramer sighed as she reached her willowy arms down to remove the delicate suede flats she wore. She looped a finger in the curve of each tightly tailored heal, letting her shoes dangle at her side. With her face in a softly resigned set, she stepped forward toward the surf to enjoy her greatest remaining pleasure. A slow, half smile pulled up ever so slightly the aging beauty of her round face when the cold water broke between her toes.

The smile did not last, though, and her features evened to smooth resignation once again as she remembered the witch. The cool rush that had come with her own acquiescence to the sorceresses possession was so much like the waves frigid touch.

Cool and fresh with a heightened sensibility she had never felt before, or would ever feel again.

Feet first and fast she had fallen into the icy waters of the witches power, tumbling blissfully out of herself into grander things. She had loved it until that first kill, feeling the first bystander bleeding on her hands as service to a war she had let start. She had been so confident that the woman who had appeared to her would give her a life of wonder at the top of the world, a fulfillment of the fanciful dreams she had thought to have long abandoned with childhood.

Every adult looses their childhood dreams, but many still keep them under the current of their life's monotony, hidden like gold in a river bed. The instinctual waters rush over and try to bury the treasure but the explorer has only to dip his hands below the fray to find again what was always there. Most, though, don't bother to look, or look back as it were, without a catalyst, a drought to reveal the land, a storm to wash it upon the shore.

The witch had been Edea's revealing storm.

Her every soring, romantic dream shown as a light of summons in the witches yellow eyes, and Edea felt them completely within her grasp if she could only look out through those eyes, know the secrets behind them. She had known those secrets, known them like her own golden dreams, but knowing was never as romantic as wondering, and she would pay dearly for crossing the threshold between the two. She had cried even though the witch never did. In her mental prison she had cried, all with the hope of feeling alive still burning in her like an aching passion. It was like she had been buried alive, trapped beneath the dirty soil of her own choice.

Then there they were, lined up before her with faces of hate, terror, and the stoic determination of warriors. Her children did not know her, nor she them, and looking back she finally realized that worse than knowing too much was forgetting what you already know.

Only one had stood with her in the madness, falling to madness himself. It would shred his young, raw seams, leaving only a tattered web of the boy who had not the chance to become a man.

Of the witch, herself, what Edea remembered most was the single minded drive born of a very secret fear. A fear none of her enemies could have ever fathomed while braided between the strings of her carefully planned solution. After her possession, Edea had not recalled all the memories or motivations of her mistress, then slowly but surely, memories not her own began to form.

Edea stepped further into the transparent turquoise waters, letting it touch the hem of her dark skirts. The water seeped into the fabric, pulling the skirt downward, making it heavy around her hips with the swish of every wave. She didn't mind. Her senses were tuned to a different frequency, feeling the primal forces of the earth all around her, listening with the astute perception the dark sorceress had left filtering through her veins.

_The feared ones were balking at their bits, they would break them soon. . ._

The weary woman in the water rose her free hand, then, opening her balled fist before her. The salty breeze swirled over her palm and caught up the flower petals she'd had curled beneath her fingers. Eight petals, each of a different breed, each of a different flower floated out across the sea.

"Edea?"

A voice behind her called, and Edea turned. One solitary petal turned from the sea with her, dancing on a stray current of air toward the other woman standing at the bottom of the stares that spiraled down from the cottage. The shred of a white lily, aided by the breeze, caught on the other woman's black hair, and stalled there between the strands of her side swept bags.

Rinoa Heartilly reached up to pull the petal out of her hair, and stared at it curiously before she let the breeze take it again.

"What are you doing in the water, Edea? Your skirts are soaked." Rinoa questioned.

Edea pick up her skirts as she pushed back trough the water. "I'm waiting, sweet child."

The pale and dark young sorceress, who looked as if she were Edea's owns blood relation, furrowed her dramatically thick brows. "Don't you mean 'wadding'?"

Edea looked off to the ocean horizon, blue on blue, and smile that half smile once more. "No." she said.

Rinoa's innocent disposition betrayed her confusion all too openly, but the girl did not inquire further.

"Come inside." Edea kindly said putting a hand on the girl's shoulder and turning her back toward the cottage. "We'll have blueberry tea, and you'll tell me why you've come."

Rinoa's eyes fell to the step's cold gray stone as the two women began the clime up to the cottage, and her eyes looked as dreary as the stones color. They were all so weary, she thought, even this innocent little one. If Edea had not been trapped once before, her own emotions sealed in the tomb of a greater magic, she would have cried for them all at that moment, but she had been buried for to long. She only smiled, small and melancholy.

_It will only get worse..._

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**That just a little bit of mystery for you. Everything will be explained later, some of it much later, but you'll understand more about the currant situation in the world -even though the summery explained quite a bit- in the next chapter. I should have that posted in little under a week. **

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	2. The Outpost of Advancing Day

**It has been a while since I last posted. I'm so sorry about that. You know how life gets in the way. I still love this story and want to continue it.**

**Declaimer: Don't own them except for Darbin and Kai, and I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of eithers wrath.**

_**Chapter One**_

_**The Outpost of Advancing Day**_

The ocean sounded unnerving at midnight beneath only the sallow light of a crescent moon, but little Seifer was determined to not be afraid. Standing on the beach it was so dark he sometimes didn't know from which direction the waves roaring rustles were coming from. They seemed to echo from before, beside, and behind him all at once, and until his eyes adjusted, he squinted at the splotches of white foam that webbed over the waves.

Once he found the direction of the sea, he faced it and stared out at the black water, trying to find where it met the dark sky. Looking for any disturbance on the surface, he knitted his dark auburn brows to string a hard scowl across his five year old face.

He had snuck out of the orphanage's nursery window every night since the somber and buttoned-up adults had dropped him in the dump six days before. But he was certain his father was on his way, and he knew when his father came he would arrive by sea in his sleek Galbadian ship that dived underneath the waves. Mama had called it a submarine, and his daddy got to tell everyone living on it what to do. Seifer's father was a hero, a leader, and he would save Seifer from this cage by the sea.

While listening to every sound, and looking at every glimmer across the water that could possibly be his father's submarine, Seifer heard the sand stir behind him. He turned, shaking fervently, putting up his little fists in just the way his father had taught him. He was poised to destroy anything that threatened.

No threat, just ripples of golden hair, strands of silk flipping up as a little blonde girl stepped away, startled at Seifer's defensive shift.

The girl was frozen in place, her shoulders shrugged up preparing for a blow. She looked like a stupid, helpless puppy, Seifer thought. No one in this place was worth any time, they were all stupid babies and he hated having to wait around to be taken back to the place he belonged.

"What do you want, little mutt?" The angry little boy furiously shouted.

The girl flinched and didn't speak. Seifer huffed exasperatedly and said, "Can't you hear, mutt."

"M...my name is Quisty." the girl suddenly shouted trying to triumph over a toddlers lisp. The out burst startled Seifer for a second, he'd expected the puppy to whimper away as lowly animals should. He deepened his scowl.

Let her bark, he thought. No matter.

"Don't care 'bout your name." he said, in a growl that mirrored that of a snow lion cub's. "I'm not going to stay in this stupid place very long."

The girl, Quisty, or whatever her name was, released the tension from her shoulders and straitened, sticking her thin little nose in the air.

"It's not stupid, Matron is nice."

Seifer was loosing interest with the girl, and he turned back to the sea. "Nice is boring." he said smugly, proud to echoed his father's favorite saying.

The girl stomped up beside him. "Is not!"

"I don't have time for wimps." Seifer said, glancing at her.

He smiled evilly as he watched her nostrils flair and her chin crinkle. _That's right, Cry,_ he thought. If this was where his dad had chosen to stick him as he waited for him to return form seafaring he might as well enjoy himself while waiting.

"I'm not a wimp!" She whined.

"Ooooh," He turned on her again, slower now that he knew where he stood, and he figured that was far above her. "So sad. Little mutt's whimpering in a corner." He stepped closer to her, his perfectly white teeth shining like the daunting glints off a dozen sharp daggers. "That's what wimps do, they whimper. They cry."

Quisty's eyes were starting to swim with tears, they were glittering like morning dew through the lenses of her glasses. "You're not suppose to be out here." She crossed her arms and stood her ground, "And I'm going to tell if you don't come in."

"Make me." He jabbed a finger tauntingly into her shoulder, hard enough to make her flinch and sway but not fall.

She didn't run away like he thought she would, like he hoped she would. Her pretty eyes, wide and moist, betrayed her fear, but her little body never turned or wilted.

"I'm telling." she said, and scampered back with resolve toward the cottage.

He couldn't have that, he still had to keep a look out. So he went after her, grabbed her shoulder and swiftly flung her around. Her knees buckled at the hard angle, and she fell to the ground in a spray of sand.

"You're not telling anything."

He liked the angle that towering over her provided him, her legs curled under her and smudged with sand, her face down and obstructed with hair. She lifted her face up to him and there was anger and challenge there. She shot up, salty moisture trailing her cheeks, and swatted at him with open hands.

_So girly_, he thought. He dodged her flailing hands and plucked her wrists from the air as one of her hands nearly struck his face.

Before she could even cry out, both their attentions sharply shifted to a roar surfacing form under the sea. An anvil cut head pushed above the waves, and Seifer released Quisty's wrists and ran to the water line, trudging through the surf crying out to the shadowed figure.

"Daddy!"

The figure in the water turned up and the light caught in a pair of large eyes, slanted and green with a cat's narrow pupil. Seifer pulled back in surprise, falling to the water below.

A fearsome snarl soared high above the little children, and the creatures' lean, snake like body wiggled out from under the deep blue. Metallic gray-blue scales winked like city lights as the moon played across the reptilian body and water ran off the rotund shaft in sheets.

Seifer was crumpled and paralyzed in the soggy mix of sea water and sand. This was not what was suppose to come up from under the sea, this thing would not deliver him, it would kill him. He wanted to cry and thrash the unearthly skin of the monster for not being what it should, but he could not move for fear.

Then he heard a voice in his head, skittering across his mind like electrical sparks. It was painful, it was too much. He bit back his scream, only to hear one from the girl behind him.

"Remember me children. Remember your exile, and know we are the same." The voice was not speaking aloud, but violating his thoughts.

The creature disappeared beneath the water just as swiftly as it had risen, and Seifer grabbed his head in pain when the monster was out of sight. The words it had said echoed, repeated, and seared into him with the sizzle of a cattle brand.

He heard sobs behind him, and turned in the water on his hands and knees. He felt the waves chilling bite all at once, and was surprised he hadn't before. The little girl was crumpled down as he was, sobbing tears over the dry sand, running salty trails over salty earth. No he wouldn't have that. As much as he had wanted her too cry before, he wouldn't witness what he, himself, wanted to do, what he wouldn't let himself do.

"Crying clouds your eyes, eyes are meant to be clear." he heard his fathers words so clearly. He would heed them.

"Get up." he shouted, but the girl continued to weep messy tears.

Seifer pushed himself out of the water, and ran back towards her, grabbing her by the arms and pulling her up to face him as soon as he reached her. She kept her head down, crying quieter now but still crying just the same.

"Stop crying!" he ordered. She didn't comply and he shook her.

"Stop"

She snapped her head up and pouted in his face. "Why?!" she whined.

He stared at her for just a moment, not really understanding his hesitation, then he released her shoulders and rubbed his hands swiftly over her cheeks. She shook her head and tried to wiggle away but he kept advancing on her, banishing the tears with his careless hands.

Finally he stopped so she could back away, and she did, holding her cheeks, her fingers brushing the red rims of her eyes.

"You're mean." she said, softly. Holding him in a trance - like the monster had before her, yet different, but no less imposing - she stared to back away further.

"Mean!" she shouted, before she turned and run away.

He watched her, relieved that she was fleeing. That's what he had wanted all along, right? He knew what he wanted. He would always know what he would want.

_**" 8 "**_

19 Years Later

Only a few street lights were left burning over Timber's deserted roads, most had been blown out or blasted horizontal onto the sidewalk. Dimly through a dense fog a thin crescent moon shrouded a buildings uneven silhouette of broken steal, sheet rock, and stone in pale blue. Those who witnessed the bombing had said the building had fallen like waif foliage in the wind to settle into haphazard rubble no garden rake could possibly clear.

Making his way through the twisted iron jungle of the ruined building, Seifer Almasy paid no mind to the glass of shattered windows crunching beneath his boots. He was so use to the sound that he almost couldn't imagine how it had not always been there, grinding like little chicken bones under his toes. No one in Timber went outside without a pair of thick-soled shoes on, because no corner of the city was not sprinkled with the clear jagged bits.

When it had been whole two months ago, the half standing building, Seifer remembered, housed the offices of a small local paper that swung pro-Galbadian occupation.

They'd paid a high price for their political position.

The situation in Timber had become annually more volatile since the end of the Second Sorceress War with the coalition of all Timber's resistance groups under Andre Carmel and his circle of die hard revolutionaries. These men had been professionally blowing shit up for years, and they were damn good at it too, Seifer had to admit. He'd seen Tec-Mag coupling, and advanced firaga magic like no other during his time in the turbulent city.

Timber was the perfect place for a violent man with an infamous face to try and disappear. The irony was that Seifer never thought he would be one to want to disappear.

Seifer crinkled his brow when a dry, dusty mist fell before his eyes. Looking up, he quickly parried out from under a falling marble door frame that had been the building's sculpted entrance. Its thin egg and dart cornice crumbled to the ground at his feet, spraying dust on the cuffs of his dark blue trousers. He sighed at the fallen frame. He hadn't notice he had stepped under it, and he never would have stepped under something so ready to fall if he were not so distracted.

The night he stalked reminded him of recent dreams.

He'd been dreaming lately about the old Centran orphanage of all things. Memories so old he certainly would have forgotten them even without the mental deterioration from the GFs. Him and Quistis Trepe on the beach at night, the same cresent moon above, something in the water, words in his mind telling him to remember, him wiping away tears.

He dreamed it over and over, always the same. What was he supposed to remember, other than him feeling like a fool? And it was really beginning to piss him off that any one of _'our great world's saviors' _were entering his subconscious so often. Couldn't they just leave him alone?

He didn't care to wipe the dust mites away from his shoes, as he moved like an errant wolf to loiter at the mouth of an alleyway one block down. He rested under one of the only remaining street lights left buzzing in the relative silence.

His appearance that night would have surprised anyone who knew him. He'd discarded his tattered gray coat not long after he'd come out of time compression. Fujin had pointed to the old thing as the disciplinary committee walked the streets of Fisherman's Horizon and said 'OLD'. Seifer had grievously growled at her suggestion, but when Rajin had agreed with a tentative 'She's right, ya know', Seifer had let Fujin throw the thing off the docks.

It had been a moment of symbolism that he now looked back on with more than just a little scorn. Then, it had been oddly like watching his own burial at sea, now, it was just another romantic notion that he'd fallen to. It was just a coat and with it nothing else had floated off into the blue, especially not his troubles. Occasionally, he absently felt its weight on his shoulders, and reached up to flip the collar only to find it wasn't there. It was in those little moments that he would remember he was no longer bound for greatness.

Instead of his ancient gray standby, he was wearing a stolen Galbadian uniform that itched like it had seen too many sandy beach patrols - where you'd find sandy beaches in Timber he didn't know. Irritably, he shifted the helmet curled in his right arm to settle it in the crook of his left so as to discharge a cigarette form his crinkled pack.

He lit up, sucked in, and released the first drag with a husky sigh. As he took the first drag and looked around he suddenly felt ridiculous in the moody setting.

He was reminded of those old black and white films that one of his adolescent girl friends had dragged him to, Noir, he thought they were called. The ones with the depressing endings that had always made him want to trust Hyperion right between his own ribcage. The stars in those movies were always loitering on the backstreets or in the bars, smoking their lives away and going home to dank apartments in the early hours of morning to cut up the memories of their own mistakes with blasted self-reflection.

A lot like life, those movies never had the structure of a romantic fairy tale, with the world returning to a perfect utopia after the knight stained his sword with the dragons blood, every terrible affair bookended with sunshine. That was a story for a child, a man stunted, a fool.

It seemed to him that the old movie had it right, life was just a muddled secession of unlinked nothings plagued with various fame fatals. And so he loitered and smoked, resigned to wait for the next fame fatal to push him further into the night.

He was just thankful he wasn't one to go in for hats, as those old stars had, and he wasn't now waring a fedora. That would have been bullet worthy grounds for suicide.

"Blood Orchid."

The sound hadn't surprised him he knew the man was there. In fact Seifer irritably rolled his eyes and nearly growled at the whisper that came from down in the ally.

"I already told you I'm not using a Hyne-damned alias, Kai."

The man that leaned out from the shadows of the alleyway, the street light just barely streaking across the relief of his boyish face, snickered at Seifer. "Where's your respect for stealth?"

"If you weren't stealthy enough not to be followed, a fucking code isn't going to do you any good." Seifer said, without looking at the new arrival.

Kai seemed unfazed by Seifer's irritation. He smiled cheerfully like an exuberant child who liked to watch the bar on a mouse trap crush its victim.

"It's a good name for you, I thought. The ancient Trabians carved the Blood Orchid onto the hilts of their sacrificial daggers."

Kai stepped out from the alley's half light and stood with Seifer beneath the streetlight's yellow wash. Seifer briefly gave the man a glance through his peripherals. He wore the same Galbadian uniform as Seifer, and he also held the helmet in his arm. Yet, his is hair was the lightest shade of blonde, almost a toe-head white that made Seifer want to put a black sky mask over it, and then the helmet over that, afraid it's radioactive glow might compromise their objective.

As well connected in the Timberian underworld as he was, Kai, Seifer had always thought, would have been better suited slicing bodies in a morgue than working for his uncle, crime lord, and war profiteer, Jacon Aurus. The kid was constantly popping out useless, morbid information, and was as off-in-space as a lost satellite. He didn't think like the rest of the scum of the slums, and rumor had it he came from the privileged country estate his uncle had set up for his sister long before Kai was born. Yet, he was down right creepy.

"Living poetry never lives very long, professor." Seifer returned bitterly.

"That I can agree with." Kai licked his lips and smiled.

Suddenly the trilling rumble of an engine could be heard approaching, and the two men squinted through the fog to catch the outline of a truck. The truck's engine whirled down as the driver pulled it up to idyll before the two men.

A man of intimidating bulk, with an ample belly that rolled in a toredeforce medley with the rippling muscles of his pectorals and arms, jumped out of the passenger side and immediately regarded Kai with a dubious once over.

"Who's the snow flake?" The man said in a fleet rumble, that sound disturbingly like a bass singer on speed. Seifer had always found Darbin Slone's voice in perfect harmony with his personality, brisk, yet bottommost and big. If the battle drums of war could stand up and kick a persons ass it would feel a lot like getting smacked down by Darbin Slone.

Kai stepped forward indignantly, a testy peacock with cold, hard eyes, but Seifer smacked a hard and fast hand on the kids chest before he could get his feather head thumped.

"This is Kai Morton, Aurus' _nephew_." Seifer said, vehemently stressing the relation, while wearing a conspiratorial smirk aimed at Darbin. Darbin showed no sign on his face that he saw it, just tilted his head thoughtfully as he studied Kai.

"Do you know how to tie a Granny knot, boy?" Darbin said, with a intensely serious, laser beam stare. Seifer couldn't suppress the widening of his smirk.

"Yes. I was-"

Before Kai could finish, Darbin laughed in an earth moving rumble.

"H-fucking-yne! A boy scout. We're running a boy scout through the Timbis-Galbad barricade"

Kai held his breath indignantly as Darbin and Seifer laughed, then slowly and silently he released it as confidence seemed to flow out on the calming air stream.

"I can tie many knots," Kai said threateningly, "But the noose was always my favorite."

Seifer wanted to spit, but contented himself with walking away toward the truck's passenger door.

Crime boss types were so hypocritically family bound, and adherent to their rapped forms of honor, and Jacon Aurus was no different letting this boy take part in his business without a second thought. For Seifer it had been a momentous disappointment to find out murderous crooks could be as pretencions as upper echelon bums; whom, as fate would have it, were often also good at being murderous crooks. Of course, he had little difficulty dealing with the reindeer games of rats just as long as they gave him the opportunity to swing Hyperion around while turning a profit.

"Think you could stop this charade of a pissing contest, Kai, and finish your tryst with Slone in the back of the truck?"

Darbin continued to indulge in his mirth. "Always with the original material, Seifer. You know I don't like blonde's." He smiled at Kai who had gone steely.

"And you and scout are in the back." Darbin added as Seifer started to open the passenger door.

Seifer turned. "Like hell!" he said, "I sat back there last time. It's your turn to spend the night being tossed around like a Hyne-damned garden salad."

"Seniority is the way in times of war."

"You do know that's a stolen uniform your wearing?" Seifer retorted.

"Not only soldiers show respect." Darbin was still amused when he slipped passed Seifer into the passenger seat of the truck and closed the door.

Seifer spoke through the open window, "You're in the wrong occupation for that philosophy, old man."

Darbin finally let slip his facetious twinkle, "Some would say the same of you."

_**" 8 "**_

The sure and rapid thud of his thick, rubber soled boots did not make so much as one scuff mark or whiny screech as Andre Carmel rushed down a sparse and deserted hallway. The steps he took were as honed and accurate as the edge of a well thrown dirk, curt and elegant as it rushes to slice a vital clear through. He dashed through the old Timberian estate with the highest level of anticipation, though, because had just been jarred awake by a phone call that he'd been hopping to receive for the last three nights.

Reaching his office, Carmel pushed the door open with all the force of a battering ram and let his palm, arm stretched out dramatically, linger flat against the wood as he stood under the frame.

"They found it." He said to the man waiting inside. The man leaned his back side against Carmel's own desk, short khaki covered legs crossed where his paints bloused at the ankles, his arms angled down over his abdomen, his hands clutched a manila file. He didn't move as Carmel made his grand entrance or as he answered.

"It was where the report said it would be." the man said, considerably less exuberant than Carmel felt.

"Wonderful!"

Carmel left the door way and strode directly over to the other man, snatching the file from his hands. The other man let the file be easily slipped from his grip, but an apprehensive looked ironed out his features. He said nothing.

Carmel quickly riffled through the file like a child unwrapping a birthday present, his eyes darting between pages so quickly he couldn't help but blink fifty percent more every second.

"This will buy Timber her freedom." Carmel said, almost reverently, his head still buried in the file.

The other man pushed off the desk trying to restrain a heavy sigh with only partial success. "Her freedom is already bought and paid for." And he said it as if he regretted the need to.

Carmel looked up then, smacking the file closed with a single hand, a fervently determined sheen hardening his gray eyes.

"Only, it is yet to be delivered. And it never will be with this standing in our way."

He waved the file up toward the ceiling, and the other man let the folder fly before his face without wavering the regretful stare he aimed at Carmel. Carmel continued.

"This _will _bring peace, Colben. I wont let the strings of commerce make me dance to the trumpets of war any longer. The dirty dealing is done."

"You know this information was meant to be used differently. I'm saying this as your friend." Colben appealed, but Carmel turned and began to head back for the door even as Colben still spoke.

"Your going to piss off a lot of people, Andre!"

Carmel suddenly stopped before the open door, and looked back with the eyes of a proud, honorable soldier. Colben felt the weight of his friends unwavering gaze. It was the look that hinted at what Carmel innately had that enabled him to organize Timber's resistance factions into one intimidating force. An ambiguous gaze that could hold steady as it witnessed death, charity, cheating, and honor. He was a true leader, but was he too much of a crusader?

"And I'll make a thousand more happy." Carmel went on, "Get President Bilcon and Commander Leonhart on the line. We have a peace treaty to negotiate"

Carmel was gone before Colben could speak. Colben set himself back down on the desk, and he whispered to the unsympathetic florescent lights.

"I hope you will, old friend."

_**" 8 "**_

Squall, as much by nature as by education, didn't mind silence, and he'd never before had a problem with the nighttime. But since she had left everything was off, too much like it had been before she appeared. Worse, maybe.

The feeling had him out of bed and swinging his gunblade at the training manikin in the middle of his apartment living room. Rinoa had always hated that its presence had to stay out in plain view of any guest she might be expecting.

He swung in un under cut that would have taken off a real mans arm but only set the manikin bobbing and blinking it's angry red lights. Being the only other light source in the place excepting the moon, the unsettling color completely stained the stony expression on Squall's face.

He had only wanted to protect her, it was what she had always required from the beginning. He swiped his weapon to the manikin's abdomen. They were their natural roles, she was the sorceress, he was her knight, that was how it was meant to be. Parry. Thrust. He didn't know what had changed that dynamic over five years, for she sure as hell hadn't told him before she up and left. He twirled the blade over his head taking off the manikin's head in a clean swipe.

The head, errant wires trailing as it rocketed across the room, hit the floor and rolled until it struck Squall's front door just as a knock sounded from the other side of the wall.

Squall turned on the offending sound like it was a bite bug needing to be put down.

The next knock was somewhat hesitant, and followed by an unsure southern drawl.

"Squall? You okay, buddy?"

Squall didn't answer as he moved to open the door. Irvine stood on the other side, with a concerned face that Squall extremely resented in his salty mood.

Irvine glanced at the headless manikin behind Squall, and cleared his throat. He didn't have to ask why the tool had been destroyed at three in the morning. Everyone knew Rinoa had left.

"Cid and Xu are waiting for you in Cid's office, seems they've gotten a surprising call from Carmel's second in command. They are planning to start talks on a peace treaty between Timber and Galbadia tomorrow."

"What?!" Squall exclaimed, shifting into commander mode, "What do they have to fairly agree on? I never believed Galbadia would give Timber up without a fight."

"Hey, don't slice the messenger."

**A/N: Love it? Hate it? Think I should lay off the Film Noir? ;)**


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